Why growth can’t be green

Good article. Towards the end, it touched on a point that I don't think is made often enough: while you can't decouple economic growth from environmental burden, you can decouple increases in standard of living from economic growth, at least in developed countries.

While a period of strong economic growth is needed to initially lift the populace from agrarian poverty, you would actually expect some economic contraction after a decent standard of living was achieved, if the economy was rationally managed to promote sustainability. Think appliances, for example. In the early years, you're going to need lots of refrigerator production, because you need to provide them to the tens or hundreds of millions of households that don't own them. After a while, everyone that needs one has one, so ideally you'd want to ramp down production and shift into maintenance mode, building replacement parts and some baseline level of new units for population growth and such.

But this would be considered a disaster in our growth focused system, you'd instead see subsidies to produce refrigerators people don't need, and the incorporation of planned obsolescence into designs to create demand from an otherwise satiated populace. People rail against the inefficiencies of planned economies, which is fair, but there seems to be this blindness about the large parts of our market economy structured like an ouroboros to both induce and satisfy demand, leading to however many millions of tons of resources being dug up, processed, and re-buried to ensure that those processors and miners have something to do.

But there’s no escaping the obvious conclusion. Ultimately, bringing our civilization back within planetary boundaries is going to require that we liberate ourselves from our dependence on economic growth—starting with rich nations.

This is a very interesting idea, and I've seen it come up a few times recently. My main question here is, what will it take for humanity to rewrite the entire global economic system we have in place for one that doesn't rely on growth as a fundamental principal? Viewed broadly, our dependence on growth is likely at the root of many of our current problems (e.g., inactivity on climate change) but short of another (more complete) meltdown of the system I'm not sure how you enact changes such as the author suggests (GDP -> GPI) without fighting the massive entrenched interests.